Ethereum: Using the wallet with a private geth node

23 Aug 2017, 21:18
by CodeOoze

Today I wanted to share the steps I follow to use the Ethereum wallet with a private blockchain in a development environment. This article follows on from previous articles where a local blockchain was setup using geth. For my dev environment I’ll be using Ubuntu 16 running on VirtualBox in Windows 10.

Previously…

Check out these previous articles which describe setting up the dev environment and other tools I’ll be using:

The new directory named /linux-unpacked should contain several files, including the ethereumwallet executable.

Start geth

Now onto more juicy stuff. We’ll need to start geth using a custom data directory. You can use the same setup as described in my article here. If you don’t have a private blockchain created already then check the article and continue from here.

Open a new terminal window and change into the directory that containsprivchain. This is the directory containing the private blockchain.

For me the directory is named /geth/privchain so cd into directory /geth:

cd geth

Now we’ll start geth. The go-ethereum wiki at GitHub has a nice reference for geth’s command line options that I encourage you to explore.

After starting the geth node you should see something like IPC endpoint opened: /home/someone/.ethereum/geth.ipc

Leave geth running in this terminal window.

Launch the Etherum Wallet

Back in the first terminal you should still be in the linux-unpacked directory.

Run the Ethereum wallet by typing the below:

./ethereumwallet

This next part I honestly couldn’t figure out - the wallet will start downloading the geth binary, even though we don’t need it. I wasted a lot of time but couldn’t resolve this, and in the end just let it run. The output looks like this: